DeepSeek reportedly orders 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips in $2.56 billion deal

September 4, 2026 at 09:02 PM2 min

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DeepSeek has reportedly placed an order for 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT AI chips, valued at approximately $2.56 billion, for its new 1GW data center in Inner Mongolia. The Chinese AI firm is said to have chosen Huawei's accelerators over NVIDIA's China-specific H20 GPUs. The order could take up to a year to fulfill due to Huawei's limited production capacity.

Key Facts

DeepSeek has reportedly ordered 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips for its 1GW data center in Inner Mongolia.
The order is valued at approximately $2.56 billion, based on a per-chip price of about 111,000 yuan ($16,000).
Huawei's annual production capacity for the Ascend 950DT is limited to a few hundred thousand units, so fulfilling the order may take up to one year.
The Ascend 950DT is built on Huawei's DaVinci v3 architecture and manufactured using SMIC's N+3 process, a 7nm-class technology.
DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng said in July that four Huawei GPUs equal one NVIDIA GPU in performance and that Huawei is two years behind.

Order Details

DeepSeek has placed an order for 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT AI chips, according to Bloomberg. The chips will be used in DeepSeek's new 1GW data center in Inner Mongolia. At a street price of about 111,000 yuan ($16,000) per chip, the total order value is estimated at $2.56 billion. The order replaces NVIDIA's China-specific H20 GPUs, which DeepSeek reportedly decided against using.

Huawei Ascend 950DT Specifications

The Ascend 950DT is built on Huawei's third-generation DaVinci v3 architecture and uses SMIC's N+3 process technology, an advanced 7nm-class node. Each chip is equipped with 144 GB of HiZQ 2.0 HBM, delivering 4.0 TB/s memory bandwidth and 2.0 TB/s GPU-to-GPU interconnect speed. The chip natively supports low-precision formats including FP8, FP4, and Huawei's proprietary HiF8. Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoD infrastructure links up to 8,192 Ascend 950DT chips to deliver 8 EFLOPS of peak AI compute power.

NVIDIA's China Position

DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng said in July that all tasks NVIDIA's GB300 can do, the Huawei supernode can do with the same latency. Wenfeng added that the only cost is that four Huawei GPUs equal one NVIDIA GPU, and Huawei is two years behind. Steven Glinert, CEO of Sphere Semi, said NVIDIA now views the Chinese domestic market as a lost cause versus Huawei. Glinert added that NVIDIA is not as committed to being able to sell in China as it previously was.